6. Direct Observational Evidence The six lunar lander descent stages left on the moon are about 15 feet across. Even the eagle-eyed Hubble Space Telescope can only see down to the width of a football field.
Another component of the moon hoax theory is based on the argument that professional observatories and the Hubble Space Telescope should be able to take pictures of the lunar landing sites. The argument runs that if telescopes can "see to the edge of the universe" then they ought to be able to take pictures of the lunar landing sites. This implies that the world's major observatories (as well as the Hubble Program) are complicit in the moon landing hoax by refusing to take pictures of the landing sites.
* However, to see the 1.2 meter long flag left on the Moon, an Earth-based telescope would have to be 200 meters wide, whereas the largest telescope on Earth is only about 10 meters across. Furthermore, such a telescope would have to mitigate against the effects of seeing, beyond what is currently possible with adaptive optics. The Hubble Space Telescope can only see objects on the Moon as small as 60 meters across.[89][90]
So, 60m doesn't quite put the angular resolution of the Hubble quite good enough to capture a planet "3 to 5 times the mass of Jupiter" 26 light years away, does it?
I do like your explanation - but why hasn't it been offered before?
How is it that pictures can be taken of a planet 26 light years away, yet the moon landing site cannot be photographed?
One of the worn out excuses is that the pixel angle is too small to see things that small.
Well, I would like to counter with the argument that seeing a 3m object 250,000 miles away is just as easy, if not easier, than seeing a planet many light years away.
And they did this optically?
Let's see if my math is wrong:
3m/400km = 7.45e-9 radians. This is what "can't" be done
x/26 light years = 7.45e-9 radians: x = 1,840,000 km. That KM, not meters.
So, if the camera can't take a picture of a 3m object on the moon [the size of the rover], it also shouldn't be able to take a picture of anything less than 1.84e9 meters in diameter 26 light years away.
Japan was quite different than the current 3rd world countries. Japan was defeated, and as such, received both the monetary and logistical support from the USA during the occupation. It wasn't on its own - ruled by a selfish dictator - the occupation forces ensured everyone got what was needed.
As several others have already mentioned, corruption is rampant in many countries. This means necessities do not get to the proper people [it will be interesting to see if the XO does]. If the government is restricting necessities, the most powerful weapon is knowledge.
If the government won't give you food, learn how to grow it. If there is no water, learn how to find and drill it. Sure, it sounds easy as I sit here and type it, but it may be the only option.
What would the tech community do if/when the USA limits rights, such as speech? I would think they would learn how to get around the restrictions, and start to speak again. There is always the risk to life and limb, but the most compliant society is one that is uneducated.
In short, the argument of success boils down to education and rulers. Good rulers allow growth, bad rulers restrict growth. In either case, to first get growth, you need access and education.
Another thing is that they image a star with a low "shutter speed" which is impossible to use on something as fast moving as the moon.
Don't both the moon and the stars move at relatively the same rate - the rotation rate of the earth? Even though the moon has its own velocity relative to the earth, that shouldn't be too big of problem given that the rotation rate is much higher. If they can take a picture of a star, they can take a picture of the moon.
As for the doppler effect, there still needs to be two things: A way to focus on that particular far away star, and the resolution to detect minute changes. As stars are moving WAY fast on their own, the doppler shift from a wobble has to be several orders of magnitude below that. How does one identify a shift due to a planet without focusing in on that particular star a million light years away?
Maybe my initial question isn't clear: Based on the link given above, which determines the "arc-seconds" of resolution for a telescope, finding and viewing [no matter what method] particular stars and/or planets with any quality, requires an impressive resolution. Obviously this resolution exists. Now, take that same resolution, which can see objects in the 1e-8 to 1e-12 [or some other non-made-up] arc-second range, and apply that to the moon, which would allow taking pictures of the stuff left behind on the moon in fantastic detail.
If the resolution of the Hubble were maintained at 2.5e-7 arc-seconds, at 1000 light years, "one pixel" would encompass 27 millions miles. Everything in that 27 million miles would then make up that 1 pixel - either on or off - with no distinction as to what makes up that pixel. Edges of stars/planets within that 27 million mile pixel would be impossible to determine. Looking for something smaller than 27 million miles in diameter would be impossible, and don't forget to scale to millions+ of light years - which only increases the diameter of space needed to fill that pixel.
At some point there is some "observing" going on. Observing necessitates pictures, if only for the reference points. I can't imagine a person is just "watching" a star for visible wobbles over the course of 4 hours.
Pictures of stars and/or planets that far away also seem to be a reality. Whether they are the visible spectrum or some other type of wavelength/instrument, the resolution issue is still a valid question. How do you "see" a star wobble if you can't monitor it with enough resolution to get the wobble? Again, I have no idea what scale the wobble is on, but I can't imagine it is 1x to 3x the diameter of the star - I would actually suspect a small fraction of the diameter for a wobble - on the order of 100,000 miles maybe, just to keep the same numbers as before. This implies some method of "seeing" far distances with some sort of quality [ie, probably more than one or two pixels of shift during the wobble].
If this resolution is available at these great distances, I still have the same question of why these resolutions are not available toward the moon. One reason I would accept is focal length, as 250,000 miles is quite a bit closer than millions of light years, but if the reason is resolution, I still have a problem with that.
I will probably be showing either my laziness or ignorance here, but what is the difference between looking for tiny stuff on the moon 250,000 miles away, and "seeing" tiny planets billions of miles away?
I hear that teams have seen planets the size of Jupiter and/or smaller, about 90,000 miles across or so, BIG numbers of light years away. Let's just play it one light year away - 6,000,000,000,000 miles or so. How do these ratios compare?
Diameter of Jupiter/one light year = 90,000 miles/6e12 miles =.000000015
Now apply that to the moon. At a distance of 250,000 miles, using the same ratio, that same telescope should be able to pick out something 19.8 feet across.
And that is only at ONE light year. There have been planets studied at thousands/millions/billions(?) of light years away. This would increase the resolution down to inches/cm, which either a) totally destroys the "can't see it on the moon" theory due to the resolution, or b) leads to speculation that something just isn't right when they publish all these findings.
I feel the need for some edumacation on this topic.
Which is why my question was posed here. Not to pick on you, but it was a convenient place to ask the question, and see what the general/. population was thinking. I guess I was looking for someone to say "50% battery life", which is incorrect.
Going back to do the numbers on the article, I have more questions about the whole process, which is where more calculations would be helpful. So I am going to make some up.
The article does say "50% of energy", which may be true, but most people want to hear "battery life" and the conversion from capacitor energy to battery life is a tricky one. You can't say that if the capacitor has 50% of the energy, it will last half as long as batteries. This is due to the battery curves and capacitor discharge curves. My initial equation is wrong: V(t) = Vi* e^ (-t/RC) so it decays, I forgot that pesky negative sign. I also said half life was R*C, which also isn't true. One time constant [still R*C] for a capacitor is the time it takes to drop to 36.8% of the initial voltage.
In the article example about the flashlight, they power a flashlight for 2 minutes with a 350F capacitor. Light bulbs are one of those devices that don't really care about voltage. It will be brighter with more voltage, but it will still be "on". Digital devices are a bit more discerning about their voltage. They have a point where the "low battery" light comes on, and then the device turns off.
As an example: Suppose my Blackberry has a 3.7V Lithium Ion battery that lasts 900 mAh, which is about 3 hours of talking. This gives the Blackberry an equivalent resistance of 12 ohms.
The battery voltage at the end of 3 hours is about 3.0V, when it dies. So, 3.0V is the lowest useful battery voltage. The battery delivers about 12000 Joules during this time.
Now switch to a capacitor. That 50% number gives the capacitor 6000 Joules. To store this amount at 3.7V it would take about 880F. The time constant is R*C = 12*880 = 10560. It takes 10560 seconds for the voltage to drop to 1/e =.368 of the fully charged voltage. It also gives a half life of 121 minutes. So, the battery voltage will drop from 3.7V to half of that, 1.85V in 2 hours. What is the useful life? When does the capacitor drop below that 3.0V line?
How about after 37 minutes of use.
So, giving up the battery or a capacitor with 50% of the energy for the fast charge time, drops the useful life of my Blackberry from 3 hours to 37 minutes.
I can't afford to charge something every 37 minutes, even if that charge only takes 10 seconds.
If you look at the battery curve for a Lithium Ion battery as in http://www.mpoweruk.com/performance.htm, you can see that the voltage is very stable for most of the life of a Lithium ion battery.
Remember what capacitor discharge looks like?
It is an exponentially decaying curve, as shown in various physics and engineering texts: V(t)=V*e^(t/RC). How do you manage the voltage? The half-life time constant is the resistive load times the capacitance. But the voltage isn't constant at all. At some point you will be above [sometimes WAY above] the desired voltage, and at some point you will be below.
It also takes energy to stabilize the voltage - so that is a continual loss.
Some uses - like motors - can handle varying voltage, but what about electronics? How does a digital camera like 2V vs. 2.4V? What about 6V? or 1.4V?
The convenience of a quick charge is nice, don't get me wrong. But the tradeoff is the voltage level, and needing to recharge more often, and more energy lost when regulating the voltage.
I also found that line of thought interesting. Not just because of the different window managers, but because of the "choice" which is a hallmark of open source.
Suppose I buy Red Hat, but simply use the console and do not install a GUI at all. Has Red Hat violated any patents?
Or what if the install only has one virtual workspace set up for the GUI, just like a Windows setup?
Because of these different choices, is it possible for Red Hat to disavow knowledge of the user's setup? Is "making available" the same as infringing here too? Just because Gnome, KDE, etc allow for multiple workspaces and Red Hat includes them, does that mean there is a violation?
This seems an unlikely argument in this case, but it would be an interesting discussion. Because of the default installation options, I think it would be hard for Red Hat to claim the user did it without any assistance from Red Hat. However, the whole "choice" line of reasoning reminds me of the codecs in various distributions: "we can't include those because they violate something" yet they can be downloaded and installed by the user. In this case the user is the one that potentially violates the law, and the original provider of the distribution has proof that they followed the law. Could the provider still be sued?
I discovered ravens are very intelligent and very territorial one spring. The morning after a particularly violent windstorm I walked beneath some trees to get to the parking lot in my apartment complex. I failed to understand the distress calls of the crows circling above. I narrowly missed stepping on a nest that had been dislodged by the wind, with a baby bird in it. As I exited the cover of the trees all of the birds started circling me, and diving toward me to protect the nest.
Each day, a group of 5 ravens would sit on the roof of the apartment complex and at the sight of me leaving - either from the apartment or the car - they would take flight, circle and dive until I was inside. Most of this journey was on pavement, far from the trees.
I don't know how common it is to be attacked by ravens, but I am not embarrassed to admit that I was both freaked out and scared by this. To hear them before I left each morning, and see them take flight as soon as I was just outside the door made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It also didn't matter what time I got back from work, as they were there waiting for something/someone all day, and as soon as I was visible, they were at it again. The immediate solution was to to take an old stick and wave it above my head to limit them to 3 feet or more above my head during their attacks. I'm sure it seemed strange to the neighbors to see someone walking to/from the car waving a stick in the air the whole time.
As good an experiment it would have been to see how long the birds would remember, I had the opportunity to move less than 2 months later, and I didn't hesitate to jump at it. The funny thing is that before I left, the nest was empty - and as nobody else had a reason to walk that particular route through the trees, I believe the little bird went on to fly away safely. Why they were after me the whole time still baffles - and scares - me.
I am not really current on browser operations, but I just make the cookies.txt file read only.
Browser starts up, sites throw cookies at it, the cookies stay in memory until the browser is closed, and then start fresh the next time the browser is opened. I don't get permanent cookies written in my cookie.txt file ever. Of course I have to log in every time I start the browser too. I also "accept" all cookies, because I know they will not be written.
I guess the downside is that I have to look at the cookies from the browser vs the.txt file, but I don't do that too often.
Any other problems [security, etc] with this approach that I am missing?
Slashdot Mirror
That would be the most valid excuse I have heard so far. At least the conspiracy theorists could then have a unified goal.
Look at these reasons though:
July 2008 - http://blogs.discovery.com/cosmic_ray/2008/07/the-top-reasons.html
6. Direct Observational Evidence
The six lunar lander descent stages left on the moon are about 15 feet across. Even the eagle-eyed Hubble Space Telescope can only see down to the width of a football field.
[just a comment from a poster, but still good info] - http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4279691.html
"As was mentioned below, you would need a telescope with a 100m mirror just to get 1m resolution on the moon."
The Hubble doesn't have a 100m mirror, and can get greater than 1m resolution? strange.
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Moon_Landing_hoax_accusations#Large_telescopes_and_the_Moon_hoax
Large telescopes and the Moon hoax
Another component of the moon hoax theory is based on the argument that professional observatories and the Hubble Space Telescope should be able to take pictures of the lunar landing sites. The argument runs that if telescopes can "see to the edge of the universe" then they ought to be able to take pictures of the lunar landing sites. This implies that the world's major observatories (as well as the Hubble Program) are complicit in the moon landing hoax by refusing to take pictures of the landing sites.
* However, to see the 1.2 meter long flag left on the Moon, an Earth-based telescope would have to be 200 meters wide, whereas the largest telescope on Earth is only about 10 meters across. Furthermore, such a telescope would have to mitigate against the effects of seeing, beyond what is currently possible with adaptive optics. The Hubble Space Telescope can only see objects on the Moon as small as 60 meters across.[89][90]
So, 60m doesn't quite put the angular resolution of the Hubble quite good enough to capture a planet "3 to 5 times the mass of Jupiter" 26 light years away, does it?
I do like your explanation - but why hasn't it been offered before?
How is it that pictures can be taken of a planet 26 light years away, yet the moon landing site cannot be photographed?
One of the worn out excuses is that the pixel angle is too small to see things that small.
Well, I would like to counter with the argument that seeing a 3m object 250,000 miles away is just as easy, if not easier, than seeing a planet many light years away.
And they did this optically?
Let's see if my math is wrong:
3m/400km = 7.45e-9 radians. This is what "can't" be done
x/26 light years = 7.45e-9 radians: x = 1,840,000 km. That KM, not meters.
So, if the camera can't take a picture of a 3m object on the moon [the size of the rover], it also shouldn't be able to take a picture of anything less than 1.84e9 meters in diameter 26 light years away.
What am I missing?
Japan was quite different than the current 3rd world countries. Japan was defeated, and as such, received both the monetary and logistical support from the USA during the occupation. It wasn't on its own - ruled by a selfish dictator - the occupation forces ensured everyone got what was needed.
As several others have already mentioned, corruption is rampant in many countries. This means necessities do not get to the proper people [it will be interesting to see if the XO does]. If the government is restricting necessities, the most powerful weapon is knowledge.
If the government won't give you food, learn how to grow it. If there is no water, learn how to find and drill it. Sure, it sounds easy as I sit here and type it, but it may be the only option.
What would the tech community do if/when the USA limits rights, such as speech? I would think they would learn how to get around the restrictions, and start to speak again. There is always the risk to life and limb, but the most compliant society is one that is uneducated.
In short, the argument of success boils down to education and rulers. Good rulers allow growth, bad rulers restrict growth. In either case, to first get growth, you need access and education.
Don't both the moon and the stars move at relatively the same rate - the rotation rate of the earth? Even though the moon has its own velocity relative to the earth, that shouldn't be too big of problem given that the rotation rate is much higher. If they can take a picture of a star, they can take a picture of the moon.
As for the doppler effect, there still needs to be two things: A way to focus on that particular far away star, and the resolution to detect minute changes. As stars are moving WAY fast on their own, the doppler shift from a wobble has to be several orders of magnitude below that. How does one identify a shift due to a planet without focusing in on that particular star a million light years away?
Maybe my initial question isn't clear: Based on the link given above, which determines the "arc-seconds" of resolution for a telescope, finding and viewing [no matter what method] particular stars and/or planets with any quality, requires an impressive resolution. Obviously this resolution exists. Now, take that same resolution, which can see objects in the 1e-8 to 1e-12 [or some other non-made-up] arc-second range, and apply that to the moon, which would allow taking pictures of the stuff left behind on the moon in fantastic detail.
If the resolution of the Hubble were maintained at 2.5e-7 arc-seconds, at 1000 light years, "one pixel" would encompass 27 millions miles. Everything in that 27 million miles would then make up that 1 pixel - either on or off - with no distinction as to what makes up that pixel. Edges of stars/planets within that 27 million mile pixel would be impossible to determine. Looking for something smaller than 27 million miles in diameter would be impossible, and don't forget to scale to millions+ of light years - which only increases the diameter of space needed to fill that pixel.
At some point there is some "observing" going on. Observing necessitates pictures, if only for the reference points. I can't imagine a person is just "watching" a star for visible wobbles over the course of 4 hours.
Pictures of stars and/or planets that far away also seem to be a reality. Whether they are the visible spectrum or some other type of wavelength/instrument, the resolution issue is still a valid question. How do you "see" a star wobble if you can't monitor it with enough resolution to get the wobble? Again, I have no idea what scale the wobble is on, but I can't imagine it is 1x to 3x the diameter of the star - I would actually suspect a small fraction of the diameter for a wobble - on the order of 100,000 miles maybe, just to keep the same numbers as before. This implies some method of "seeing" far distances with some sort of quality [ie, probably more than one or two pixels of shift during the wobble].
If this resolution is available at these great distances, I still have the same question of why these resolutions are not available toward the moon. One reason I would accept is focal length, as 250,000 miles is quite a bit closer than millions of light years, but if the reason is resolution, I still have a problem with that.
Which is why I am asking for more information.
Thanks
I will probably be showing either my laziness or ignorance here, but what is the difference between looking for tiny stuff on the moon 250,000 miles away, and "seeing" tiny planets billions of miles away?
.000000015
I hear that teams have seen planets the size of Jupiter and/or smaller, about 90,000 miles across or so, BIG numbers of light years away. Let's just play it one light year away - 6,000,000,000,000 miles or so. How do these ratios compare?
Diameter of Jupiter/one light year =
90,000 miles/6e12 miles =
Now apply that to the moon. At a distance of 250,000 miles, using the same ratio, that same telescope should be able to pick out something 19.8 feet across.
And that is only at ONE light year. There have been planets studied at thousands/millions/billions(?) of light years away. This would increase the resolution down to inches/cm, which either a) totally destroys the "can't see it on the moon" theory due to the resolution, or b) leads to speculation that something just isn't right when they publish all these findings.
I feel the need for some edumacation on this topic.
Thanks.
Which is why my question was posed here. Not to pick on you, but it was a convenient place to ask the question, and see what the general /. population was thinking. I guess I was looking for someone to say "50% battery life", which is incorrect.
.368 of the fully charged voltage. It also gives a half life of 121 minutes. So, the battery voltage will drop from 3.7V to half of that, 1.85V in 2 hours. What is the useful life? When does the capacitor drop below that 3.0V line?
Going back to do the numbers on the article, I have more questions about the whole process, which is where more calculations would be helpful. So I am going to make some up.
The article does say "50% of energy", which may be true, but most people want to hear "battery life" and the conversion from capacitor energy to battery life is a tricky one. You can't say that if the capacitor has 50% of the energy, it will last half as long as batteries. This is due to the battery curves and capacitor discharge curves. My initial equation is wrong: V(t) = Vi* e^ (-t/RC) so it decays, I forgot that pesky negative sign. I also said half life was R*C, which also isn't true. One time constant [still R*C] for a capacitor is the time it takes to drop to 36.8% of the initial voltage.
In the article example about the flashlight, they power a flashlight for 2 minutes with a 350F capacitor. Light bulbs are one of those devices that don't really care about voltage. It will be brighter with more voltage, but it will still be "on". Digital devices are a bit more discerning about their voltage. They have a point where the "low battery" light comes on, and then the device turns off.
As an example: Suppose my Blackberry has a 3.7V Lithium Ion battery that lasts 900 mAh, which is about 3 hours of talking. This gives the Blackberry an equivalent resistance of 12 ohms.
The battery voltage at the end of 3 hours is about 3.0V, when it dies. So, 3.0V is the lowest useful battery voltage. The battery delivers about 12000 Joules during this time.
Now switch to a capacitor. That 50% number gives the capacitor 6000 Joules. To store this amount at 3.7V it would take about 880F. The time constant is R*C = 12*880 = 10560. It takes 10560 seconds for the voltage to drop to 1/e =
How about after 37 minutes of use.
So, giving up the battery or a capacitor with 50% of the energy for the fast charge time, drops the useful life of my Blackberry from 3 hours to 37 minutes.
I can't afford to charge something every 37 minutes, even if that charge only takes 10 seconds.
What are the numbers for the "half as long"?
If you look at the battery curve for a Lithium Ion battery as in http://www.mpoweruk.com/performance.htm, you can see that the voltage is very stable for most of the life of a Lithium ion battery.
Remember what capacitor discharge looks like?
It is an exponentially decaying curve, as shown in various physics and engineering texts: V(t)=V*e^(t/RC). How do you manage the voltage? The half-life time constant is the resistive load times the capacitance. But the voltage isn't constant at all. At some point you will be above [sometimes WAY above] the desired voltage, and at some point you will be below.
It also takes energy to stabilize the voltage - so that is a continual loss.
Some uses - like motors - can handle varying voltage, but what about electronics? How does a digital camera like 2V vs. 2.4V? What about 6V? or 1.4V?
The convenience of a quick charge is nice, don't get me wrong. But the tradeoff is the voltage level, and needing to recharge more often, and more energy lost when regulating the voltage.
I also found that line of thought interesting. Not just because of the different window managers, but because of the "choice" which is a hallmark of open source.
Suppose I buy Red Hat, but simply use the console and do not install a GUI at all. Has Red Hat violated any patents?
Or what if the install only has one virtual workspace set up for the GUI, just like a Windows setup?
Because of these different choices, is it possible for Red Hat to disavow knowledge of the user's setup? Is "making available" the same as infringing here too? Just because Gnome, KDE, etc allow for multiple workspaces and Red Hat includes them, does that mean there is a violation?
This seems an unlikely argument in this case, but it would be an interesting discussion. Because of the default installation options, I think it would be hard for Red Hat to claim the user did it without any assistance from Red Hat. However, the whole "choice" line of reasoning reminds me of the codecs in various distributions: "we can't include those because they violate something" yet they can be downloaded and installed by the user. In this case the user is the one that potentially violates the law, and the original provider of the distribution has proof that they followed the law. Could the provider still be sued?
I discovered ravens are very intelligent and very territorial one spring. The morning after a particularly violent windstorm I walked beneath some trees to get to the parking lot in my apartment complex. I failed to understand the distress calls of the crows circling above. I narrowly missed stepping on a nest that had been dislodged by the wind, with a baby bird in it. As I exited the cover of the trees all of the birds started circling me, and diving toward me to protect the nest.
Each day, a group of 5 ravens would sit on the roof of the apartment complex and at the sight of me leaving - either from the apartment or the car - they would take flight, circle and dive until I was inside. Most of this journey was on pavement, far from the trees.
I don't know how common it is to be attacked by ravens, but I am not embarrassed to admit that I was both freaked out and scared by this. To hear them before I left each morning, and see them take flight as soon as I was just outside the door made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It also didn't matter what time I got back from work, as they were there waiting for something/someone all day, and as soon as I was visible, they were at it again. The immediate solution was to to take an old stick and wave it above my head to limit them to 3 feet or more above my head during their attacks. I'm sure it seemed strange to the neighbors to see someone walking to/from the car waving a stick in the air the whole time.
As good an experiment it would have been to see how long the birds would remember, I had the opportunity to move less than 2 months later, and I didn't hesitate to jump at it. The funny thing is that before I left, the nest was empty - and as nobody else had a reason to walk that particular route through the trees, I believe the little bird went on to fly away safely. Why they were after me the whole time still baffles - and scares - me.
I am not really current on browser operations, but I just make the cookies.txt file read only.
.txt file, but I don't do that too often.
Browser starts up, sites throw cookies at it, the cookies stay in memory until the browser is closed, and then start fresh the next time the browser is opened. I don't get permanent cookies written in my cookie.txt file ever. Of course I have to log in every time I start the browser too. I also "accept" all cookies, because I know they will not be written.
I guess the downside is that I have to look at the cookies from the browser vs the
Any other problems [security, etc] with this approach that I am missing?
Do you have any references to those privacy laws? I would like to get more information on them.
Reading today's newspaper article about the local state university here, they don't have any problem giving up the names of the students involved.
If you could provide information on the laws, I would like to inform the students that the university gave up about them.
thanks.